Bitcoin was the start of my crypto career. Actually, all people start with Bitcoin I think. I don't mean that everybody buy it straightaway, but investigating this market and learning the technology of blockchain everybody starts with classic Bitcoin. In my opinion, Bitcoin will be adopted by many countries and companies as a means of payment, so it will play more and more important role in our lives.
In my case, I started with Bitcoin in 2012. I guess that is the case with the vast majority of the cryptocurrency investors. But I know a few cases where noobs first invested in some shitcoin and lost all of their money. I had rather mixed experience with altcoins. My first investment in an altcoin was for Litecoin. It gave me good returns. But then in 2013 I invested in Quark, Terracoin, Ixcoin, Freicoin.etc and all of them gave me a loss. And perhaps because of this, I didn't took ETH seriously in 2014 and even now that is one of my biggest regrets.